With Warmth
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day 1815a. When Santana has to take of baby Harry by herself overnight for the first time, she decides to make it work when he can't sleep. - Paper Heart series - 5TH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE, day 9a of 21.


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 86th cycle. Now cycle 87!_

**_IT'S THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE OF_**_** GLEEKATHON!** - Five years! Five years! *insert flailing* Okay, not quite, but by the end of this cycle, it will have been five years of daily stories (sometimes twice a day! ... and for seven very frightening days a couple years back, three times a day!). It will also be the end of this crazy ride. I started thinking about ending gleekathon months ago, and I wanted to finish my ongoing series before that happened. It made it so I could finish out this fifth year, and it couldn't be any better that this cycle is actually ending on October 22nd 2014, which was the day it began, in 2009... Now here we go!_

**This story is an 'Element Change' for _Step 76, Trust Yourself_, a Paper Heart series story originally posted on February 15th 2014.**

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><p><strong>"With Warmth"<br>(Kurt, Brittany/) Santana, Harry (OC)  
>Paper Heart series<br>**

_**Element change: **** Santana doesn't try and bring Harry back.**_

They'd made it through the afternoon without incident, just the two of them. It was the first time she, Santana, was given him, Harry, to look after, on her own, away from Brittany or Kurt, for an extended period of time. She was going to be taking care of him overnight. And for the better part of the time they'd spent together so far, things had been a lot better than she'd anticipated, allowing her original concerns to fade into the back of her mind. She was proud of herself; she was for all intents and purposes Harry's second mother, and their entire situation wasn't the most normal, but they were making it work. Kurt and Brittany, for both wanting to be near their son at all times, while having to keep in mind that they were still in high school and living at home with their respective parents, had set up their arrangement where they had room to sleep and live in the nursery at each house, and they alternated. They couldn't well do that with Santana, too, but she didn't expect them too. Still, she and Brittany were becoming more to one another, and Brittany did believe their story would carry on in the years to come, and she was not shy to insinuate this made Santana part of their family, made her one of Harry's parents. It was a trust Santana didn't want to let down.

Yes, she had been terrified of messing things up at first – and by things she meant Harry – but they were doing well now, so she wasn't all that worried anymore… until the baby woke up in the middle of the night. She'd been ready for him, gave him his bottle, checked his diaper, picked him up, but he only kept fussing, crying, and any moment now she expected her parents to come and yell at her.

"Okay, no, I know, Shorty, I know," she kissed the top of his soft little head, carrying him out of her room, where they'd parked the crib, and carrying him down the stairs, and again down to the basement.

She thought if this ever happened her first instinct would just to get him back to his parents, his blood parents, but that wasn't what she felt now. No, they had been doing well all day, and it wasn't now that suddenly this had changed. Babies cried, that was what they did. They slept, too, and she just needed to get him back to that.

"Okay, okay…" she breathed, looking around the basement, thinking of what she might do. "We're going to sit here," she moved to the old couch, reaching for the blanket tossed haphazardly in the corner, "And we're going to relax." She sat, putting her legs up before maneuvering the blanket up over herself and Harry. He was lying against her now, crying but clinging, but she breathed deep, and she hushed, her hand still on his back, safe for her thumb, gently moving about.

She never would have imagined herself here, certainly not at this time in her life. Obviously, Kurt and Brittany had probably been thinking the same thing, but now here she was, for the first time ever, with a baby in her care that might someday call her… Mama. What scared her the most though, was how much she already loved him. She'd experienced all these kinds of love in her life, yes, the love of her parents, of friends, of… Brittany. But the way she felt for little Harry, the one she'd nicknamed Shorty, it was just… overwhelming, and growing every day. And now here she was, with a baby pressed against her, sharing warmth, and she felt so fiercely protective of him that she didn't entirely know what to do with her own emotions anymore.

"You'll always me to turn to, okay?" she told him. "No matter what happens, no matter if…" She stopped, sighed. She didn't want to make it a possibility, but she needed to make the promise to him, because what if it did happen… "If your mom and me, we don't work out, and I'm just your… your aunt or something, then that's just what I'll be, and I'll be the best one you've got, deal?"

She kept talking to him as long as she could, keeping her voice at a calm, even pace, knowing it would work best to get him to go back to sleep. She told him everything she could think of, from how her day had been to what she did, who she saw… Any annoyances she had experienced in that time she would hide beneath the cover of a soft, happy tone and the reassurance that the boy was too young to ever retain or understand any of what she said. She kept it clean, of course, but then there were plenty of ways to address someone's failings without letting certain words reach Harry's pink ears.

She'd been mildly aware of her starting to doze off, yawning, but she didn't remember her stopping to talk, or his stopping to cry. She didn't remember falling asleep, except the next thing she knew it was morning, and Harry was just waking up. They'd spent the night there in the basement, and she'd gotten him to fall asleep just fine. She smiled, seeing the way he yawned.

"Good morning to you, too, Shorty," she grasped his hand, and he gripped at her finger. "That wasn't so hard, was it?" she sat up with him, frowning at the pain in her neck from the position she'd kept. "Next time, a pillow," she told herself.

She wasn't going to complain about the neck thing. The way she saw it, she'd needed to do something for Harry, and she'd done it, and she'd learned from it. The baby boy brought out a whole other side out of her, and she was surprising herself already at how much she didn't mind it, but all the same it belonged to the two of them together, and no one else.

THE END

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><p><strong>AN: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.  
><strong>**In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are  
><strong>**always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!**


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